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DST’s Kayla Johnson is Best Young Scientist

Kayla Johnson won the Best Young Scientist Award at the International Conference on Traffic and Transport Psychology.

Defence researcher Kayla Johnson has won the Best Young Scientist Award at the International Conference on Traffic and Transport Psychology (ICTTP).

Johnson was recognised for her lead-author role in the multi-author paper entitled - Early morning high-dose caffeine mitigates driving performance decrements during sleep deprivation.

This is a great honour as Johnson’s work is an excellent example of DST’s science having an impact beyond Defence. It is also a culmination of a sustained team effort that Kayla has contributed to, over several years.

Kayla’s team, led by Defence researcher Dr Eugene Aidman, has studied cognitive fatigue and drowsiness countermeasures for over 10 years.

In 2012, the team was tasked to address the issues of acute and chronic fatigue affecting driver safety (tasked by Australian Defence Test and Evaluation Office and an Army Engineering unit).

Since then, Johnson has been instrumental in developing the team’s sharply-focused collaborative research program investigating cognitive fitness, its assessment and enhancement through tailored training, operator functional state monitoring and cognitive augmentation technologies.

The program has rapidly grown into a multi-partner international engagement involving a score of university and research and development (R&D) industry stakeholders.

Chief Defence Scientist Dr Alex Zelinsky congratulated Kayla in a message, saying “Well done! We are very proud of you. I look forward to watching your career develop at DST.”